Stendhal

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Stendhal

Henri-Marie Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer. He is known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology and for the dryness of his writing-style. He is considered one of the foremost and earliest practitioners of the realistic form, and his most famous novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).

Biography

Born in Grenoble, France, he had a miserable childhood in stifling provincial France, hating his unimaginative father and mourning his mother who died when he was small. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline. The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. He travelled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon's army in the 1812 invasion of Russia), but formed a particular attachment to Italy, where he spent much of the remainder of his career, serving as French consul at Trieste and Civitavecchia and writing. His novel The Charterhouse of Parma, among other works, is set in Italy, which he considered a more sincere and passionate country than Restoration France. An aside in that novel, referring to a character who contemplates suicide after being jilted, speaks volumes about his attitude towards his home country: "To make this course of action clear to my French readers, I must explain that in Italy, a country very far away from us, people are still driven to despair by love."

Beyle used the pseudonym "Stendhal", supposedly chosen as an anagram of "Shetland" (although Georges Perec may have invented this explanation - references to Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) feature extensively in Perec's unfinished last novel 53 jours). Alternatively, some scholars believe he borrowed his nom de plume from the German city of Stendal as a homage for Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Stendhal was a dandy and wit about town in Paris, as well as an inveterate skirt-chaser. His genuine empathy towards women is evident in his books (Simone de Beauvoir spoke highly of him in The Second Sex), and contrasts with his obsession with sexual conquests. He seems to have preferred the desire to the consummation. One of his early works is On Love, a rational analysis of romantic passion. This fusion, or tension, of clearheaded analysis with romantic feeling is typical of Stendhal's great novels; he could be considered a Romantic realist.

Contemporary readers did not fully appreciate Stendhal's realistic style during the Romantic period in which he lived; he was not fully appreciated until the beginning of the 20th century. He dedicated his writing to "the Happy Few", referring to those who lived without fear or hatred. Today, Stendhal's works attract attention for their irony and psychological and historical aspects.

Stendhal was an avid fan of music, particularly the composers Cimarosa, Mozart, and Rossini, the latter of whom he wrote an extensive biography, Vie de Rossini (1824), now more valued for its wide-ranging musical criticism than for its historical accuracy.

He died in Paris in 1842 and is interred in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Stendhal's brief, saucy memoir, Souvenirs d'Egotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) was published posthumously in 1892. Also published was a more extended autobiographical work, thinly disguised as the Life of Henry Brulard.

Crystallization

In Stendhal's 1822 classic On Love he describes or compares the “birth of love”, in which the love object is crystallized in the mind, as being a process similar or analogous to a trip to Rome. In the analogy, the city of Bologna represents indifference and Rome represents perfect love:

When we are in Bologna, we are entirely indifferent; we are not concerned to admire in any particular way the person with whom we shall perhaps one day be madly in love with; even less is our imagination inclined to overrate their worth. In a word, in Bologna “crystallization” has not yet begun. When the journey begins, love departs. One leaves Bologna, climbs the Apennines, and takes the road to Rome. The departure, according to Stendhal, has nothing to do with one’s will; it is an instinctive moment. This transformative process actuates in terms of four steps along a journey:

Admiration – one marvels at the qualities of the loved one.
Acknowledgement – one notices the return affection of the charming person.
Hope – one envisions gaining the love of the loved one.
Delight – one exults in overrating the beauty and merit of the person he or she loves.

First of all, one admires the other person. Second, one acknowledges the pleasantness in having acquired the interest of a charming person. Third, hope emerges. In the fourth stage, one delights in overrating the beauty and the merit of the person whose love one hopes to win. This journey or crystallization process (shown above) was detailed by Stendhal on the back of a playing card, while speaking to Madame Gherardi, during his trip to Salzburg salt mine.

Works

Novels

Armance (1827)
Le Rouge et le Noir (variously translated as Scarlet and Black, Red and Black, The Red and the Black, 1830)
La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) (The Charterhouse of Parma)
Lucien Leuwen (1835, unfinished, published 1894)
Lamiel (1840, unfinished, published 1889)
The Life of Henry Brulard (1835-1836, published 1890)

Novellas

The Pink and the Green (1837, unfinished)
Mina de Vanghel (1830, later published in La Revue des Deux Mondes)
L'Abbesse de Castro (1832)
''The Duchess of Palliano
''Vittoria Accoramboni
''Vanina Vanini
''The Cenci

Nonfiction

De L'Amour (1822) (On Love)
Souvenirs d'Égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist, published in 1892)

His other works include short stories, journalism, travel books (among them Rome, Naples et Florence and Promenades dans Rome), a famous collection of essays on Italian painting, critical essays on Racine and Shakespeare, and biographies of several prominent figures of his time, including Napoleon, Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio.

External links

French Audio Book (mp3) of the red and the black incipit
French site on Stendhal
Le Rouge et le Noir
The Red and the Black English translation

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